


How Does This End

by whatTheFuckIsThis



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 08:02:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18774562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatTheFuckIsThis/pseuds/whatTheFuckIsThis
Summary: The final battle is finished. Without a clear winner, the injured Oliver and Emiko are trapped in a collapsed building with nothing to do but try not to die and finally answer the question all heroes and villains need to answer: How does this end.





	How Does This End

The concrete was cold on Oliver’s back and it made him more aware of how sweaty he was than he wanted to be. He glanced to his left where he’d last seen Emiko to make sure their fight was really over this time. He saw her in the same position as him. Lying on her back, her stomach rising slowly with each inhaled breath and collapsing with every exhale.

The arrows sticking out of her leg and arm assured him that she wasn’t getting up anytime soon and the knife embedded in the left-side of his abdomen guaranteed that he would be there to keep her company. Not that he could go anywhere even if he wasn’t injured.

For the second time in as many weeks he was trapped in the rubble of a partially collapsed building. He and Emiko had been close enough to a load-bearing wall to avoid the wreckage but others hadn’t been so lucky. The crushed bodies of Ninth Circle soldiers and Star City cops were lying around the room. Their severed limbs and abandoned weapons had been scattered by the explosion, making the parking garage look like a scene out of a bad slasher film.

Oliver had been too wrapped up in their fight to notice where the explosion came from, but the resulting silence was all too familiar. To fill the silence, he asked a question he had tried to ask Emiko before but could never quite get her to answer.

“How does this end? Your fight. This revenge fantasy of yours. What do you want from it?” He turned his head to the left to look at her and flinched as he felt the bruise on his neck.

She didn’t look back. She was staring at the Ninth Circle soldier barely a foot away from her, now lying crushed underneath a metal pipe. His bloody face stared back at her, his cry for help frozen in time. A cry she would never get to answer.  

Blood leaked from a rough scrape on Emiko’s head onto the ground beside her. The original wound had dried with some of her hair stuck to it, forming a clump that looked more like it belonged in a shower drain that on someone’s face.  

She coughed weakly and swallowed the spit and blood that pooled in the back of her throat.

“I’ve lied about a lot of things, but I never lied about what I wanted out of this. I wanted everyone who hurt my mother to suffer and die. Just like she did. I wanted justice.” She paused and let out three short coughs before continuing. “Robert and Moira are dead. And now Dante is too. My revenge fantasy, as you call it, is over.”

“What now?”

She grinned. “I could ask you the same question, brother.” She turned to look at him. Her eyes looked tired. With the blood and dirt caking her face, it was hard to think of her as the same person he’d met only a few months earlier. Oliver thought she would probably say the same thing about him.

“You’ve been fighting as the Green Arrow for seven years now and what do you have to show for it? A handful defeated supervillains and even more dead friends? You should be asking yourself what you want from this hero fantasy of yours.”

“The city needed me. First Slade, then Damian Dark, then-”

“There’s always a fight, Oliver. No one asked you to go looking for it. That was your choice.”

“It wasn’t a choice.”

“Maybe not at first. But it is now,” she said. “Everyone in Star City has heard about that list your father gave you, your reason for becoming the Green Arrow. But after you murdered all of Robert’s rich asshole friends, you didn’t stop. After Slade nearly wiped this city off the map because you lived here, you didn’t stop. After you became mayor and had a chance to ‘Save This City’, you didn’t stop. At what point did being the Green Arrow stop being a responsibility and start being a something you wanted?”

She coughed again and almost choked. She tried to sit up but her lower back protested, keeping her body on the ground. The bruise from where Spartan had kicked her was starting to form and she would have to bear the pain unmedicated.

Oliver stared at his sister as she tried and failed to move. He lifted his shoulder to make sure he could get to a standing position if he needed to. It was painful but possible.

Emiko’s breathing was getting heavier and she now winced when she inhaled. She had started sweating and shivering. If she wasn’t lying down, she probably would’ve been dizzy and nauseous from the concussion he’d undoubtedly given her during their fight. He’d seen enough people die to know that, without medical treatment, she would die too. The only question was how.    

“Emiko. When I got back to Star City seven years ago, I was… a different person than I am today. I was reckless and violent and angry and-”

“Doesn’t seem like you’ve changed.”

“-And I’ve lived with my actions ever since. I made a lot of enemies and they’ve tried to hurt me and my family. This city. Those people were my responsibility. I couldn’t just walk away from them.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. You’ve walked away plenty of times and the city was fine every time. Then, every time, you would come back a few months later and some jerk with a plan for world domination would set up shop here to fight you.”

“That’s not exactly what-”

“You kept coming back because you wanted to. You like the thrill of the fight, of the kill.”

“I don’t kill people… anymore.”

“Oh please. You and your team killed seven of my soldiers last week. And permanently injured most of the others.”

“Injuring is not the same killing.”

“It’s not much better.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he just looked away.

Two broken bodies were splayed out a few feet away from him. He couldn’t tell which group they belonged to, not that it mattered now. A crushed skull was the same regardless of what side of the law its body used to be on. One of their guns had slid away from them, landing only a few inches out of Oliver’s reach. If he could just reach it…

A string of hacking coughs broke his concentration. He looked over to Emiko and knew she was getting worse. He could feel himself getting weaker but at least his bleeding had stopped. Hers continued. He must have hit an artery or a vein, otherwise the bleeding would’ve stopped by now.  

“Can I tell you something?” Emiko asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Of course.”

“I used to look up to the Green Arrow. And I know I told you that before to get you to trust me, but I meant it. When you first came back, you got rid of some of the worst people in this city. Those people ruined thousands of lives. They stole every cent they could from the poor people in this city. They forced people into homelessness and others into inhumane living conditions. Something needed to be done and you did it.”

He didn’t look back on those times as fondly as she did, but he could understand why she did. He regretted killing most of the people he killed, but none of them were on his father’s list. Every one of them should have been in prison for life. They’d all been charged with serious enough crimes for that to happen, but the system had failed. Every time, they got off without any charges and continued to ruin the city he called home.

“But then you started acting like the cops, only with even less of a pretense of following the law. And that was when I knew you were just like every other asshole who thinks they’re a hero. You were fighting for yourself, not for the city, or some lofty ideal. Just because you wanted to. And you wanna know the worst part?”  

She smiled to herself as if she had figured out the punchline to a sick joke.

“You still act like you’re so much better than the people you hunt down. As if being a vigilante doesn’t hurt as many people as the petty criminals you usually pick up. Maybe if you didn’t reek of moral superiority fewer people would try to kill you.”

He looked back at Emiko. She looked calmer than she had just a few minutes ago. Her words should’ve made his angry but coming from a dying woman with nothing left to prove, they made him think. For the first time since he decided to run for mayor, he thought about whether being the Green Arrow, or even the public vigilante Oliver Queen, was the best thing for the city. He thought not just about the dangerous people he got off the streets, but also the ones who had come to Star City for him. Diaz. The Bratva. That computer guy.

“Maybe you’re right,” he muttered.  

“What was that?” She mocked.

He thought of something that seemed like a memory, with Thea, Emiko, and him as kids sitting around a board game in the Queen mansion’s living room. They were laughing and Emiko tossed a spare piece at him but when he looked, she didn’t have a face. He’d never known her as a child or even seen a picture of her.

“You’re right that being the Green Arrow isn’t just about helping the city or protecting my family. I… I want to do it. I’ve tried to walk away but…”

“But you need it.” Her tone was matter-of-fact with no hint of judgement.

He nodded and she seemed satisfied with that.

“I never wanted to hurt you, brother. But I knew you would try to stop me from killing the person who killed my mother. I couldn’t let you get in the way.”

“And the Ninth Circle? Why work with them?”

She smiled and took a deep breath.

“Dante. I didn’t lie about that either. He gave me a sense of purpose and I couldn’t let that go. Even if that purpose was to serve a weird, ancient organization with no clear goals.”

He laughed but stopped when his knife wound got more painful. At least she was self-aware enough to know how weird the Ninth Circle was.

“I wish we could start over,” he said. His injuries were finally starting to get to him. His speech was slower than he expected and he had to take more breaths, nearly one between each word. “I think we would have liked each other but we never really got to know each other. You never even met Thea. Or got a Queen Christmas card.”

“Maybe in another life… This one was too messy for us to ever get to know each other. Robert made sure of that.”

Oliver knew then what he had to do. Whether out of mercy or cruelty, he slowed inched his body towards the gun.

“You never answered my question,” he asked, partly to distract her and partly because he was still curious. “How does this end?”

“There’s only one way this can end, for both of us.”

He didn’t ask for clarification. He knew what she meant and he thought of it every time he suited up. All the Kevlar in the world couldn’t stop him from worrying about dying before he could see William and his baby grow up.

She coughed again, shallow coughs that were more hissing than hacking. As she gasped for air, he curled his fingers around the base of the gun. He didn’t like using guns, or killing, but he didn’t have many options. She was going to die, it was just a matter of how and how soon.

“I don’t regret what I did, Oliver.”

“Which part?”

“All of it,” she whispered out of necessity this time. “I don’t regret not warning Robert about the bomb on the Gambit. Or working with the Ninth Circle. Or trying to kill you. I’d do it all again.”

Oliver though he would probably feel the same way if he had lived her life, but he didn’t say that.

“I know, Emiko. I know you don’t regret it.” He pulled the gun towards him and touched his finger to the trigger. He slowly sat up, careful to not disturb the knife still in his abdomen. “And that’s why I don’t regret this.”

“Regret wha-”

He aimed for her chest and pulled the trigger, killing her before that question or any others can be asked.

He tossed the gun as far away from him as he could and laid back down on the concrete floor. It was getting hard to keep his eyes open and even harder to stay conscious, but he tried. He tried to stay alive harder than he’d ever tried before. And when, if, he woke up, he would know if he succeeded.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know the names of the new Arrow villains and I'm too lazy to search for more than a minute. 
> 
> Thanks for reading. If you feel so inclined, please leave kudos and comments.


End file.
